Gabriel Jonas Lippman

Lippman, Gabriel Jonas, 1845–1921, French physicist, Ph.D. Sorbonne, 1875. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1883 until his death in 1921. Lippman received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his method of reproducing colors photographically. In the early 1890s he developed a two-step process for recording and reproducing color images that eliminated problems plaguing earlier techniques, which lacked a way to fix the colors and resulted in rapid fading of the image. Lippmann's color photographic method was based on interference, wherein various light waves arriving simultaneously at the same point are combined; the same phenomenon causes soap bubbles to display colors even though they are actually colorless.